details in "bleecker street"

There's analysis drawn in symbolic language in Steinberg's 1970 portrait of a dissolving society, "Bleecker Street," shown in its entirety in the post below.

Starting at bottom left with the Latino radiohead, and moving right we find a very faint person composed of thin vertical lines, for his identity is very faint and tentative. Next to him is a lady made of horizontal lines, like the image on black-and-white TV. She is, in fact, a TV lady, and her personality a pastiche of things she's picked up from the tube.

The exploding-head woman, who's had way too much of a powerful psychedelic (LSD is strongly suspected) anchors the bottom line of the composition, while a wino floats in the space between her and the man all covered with hair.

I'm baffled by the hairy man, whom I've seen in Steinberg before, but never unlocked. Steinberg frequently said he was a writer who drew, and in keeping with the specificity of the other symbols in this picture, I'm sure the hairy man stands for something specific. But what?

Likewise, it's hard to tell whether the young and attractive woman next to the hairy man is reputable or disreputable, but she's a bold contrast to the very elegantly dressed small, round woman, or the nun in sunglasses, both of whom move along the street directly behind her.

At the outer edge of the sidewalk in the next row up, we see a very childish lady, who looks as if she was drawn up by an immature hand. Next to her is a dirt, or smudge of a person, symbolizing the destitute homeless insane and addicted people.

Then comes Ragtime Cowboy Joe, a ridiculous person who has

purchased a manufactured personality, and now stands athwart the sidewalk with "a itchy trigger finger." Completing the second row and the south sidewalk, a smiling crocodile is about to devour a rat. Steinberg is here using animals to represent the essential nature of an animalistic human relationship, as such things occur out in the street where there are predators and other dangerous people.

The street itself and the center of the picture is dominated by the police, who exert whatever control and order they can into the bedlam around them. The police seem unconcerned about the dead guy lying in front of the shop called RGH!, in the doorway of which a second cowboy stands, though there's nothing to suggest the corpse is his responsibility.

A skull-faced neo-nazi wearing green sunglasses and boots with spurs marches along menacingly in front of the bar FEH, whose doorway frames yet another cowboy. In front of the storm trooper and slightly off to his right, a beautiful yellow-haired lady walks confidently, protected by her large and extremely pugnacious looking dog with a human face.

I've skipped over the many of the meaningful and interesting smaller characters in this document, a social analysis by Saul Steinberg, drawn in 1970 and totally devoid of sentimentality, moralizing, or cant.